The Steadfast

The Steadfast The cast of this war drama by Mat Smart at TBG Theater. The play time-travels from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan.Credit
Tristan Fuge

In one of the longer, more ornate speeches in “The Steadfast” — Mat Smart’s snapshots of the American military, from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan — a Union soldier (John Behlmann) explains why he deserted by acting out a fictional dialogue with Abraham Lincoln.

“My apologies, Mr. Lincoln,” he says, exasperated, when the president tells him that he hasn’t killed enough men. “I’ve lost the stomach for it.”

Mr. Smart’s ambitious, nuanced work is about that stomach. Inspired by a painting by Steve Alpert (one of the play’s producers), this time-traveling drama introduces us to interconnected scenes from eight wars. The stories are linked, sometimes by family — the descendant of a Buffalo Soldier becomes a Vietnam draft dodger walking toward Canada — but also by this thematic question: What does it take to decide to kill and risk your life for your country?

Because of the excitement of battle scenes, war movies almost can’t help romanticizing combat, but “The Steadfast,” which doesn’t waste time trying to simulate fighting, does not glorify it. Nor is the play a harsh critique. Instead it is a celebration of soldiers that understands that their courage does not diminish or burnish those who decide not to fight.

Mr. Smart’s finest scenes are when he connects what happens on the battlefield to its impact back home. In one of the more fleshed-out stories, Powell, a sharpshooting soldier in Afghanistan, played with conviction by Cloteal L. Horne, becomes estranged from her husband (Nick Mills) after volunteering.

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But what looks like a moral difference proves more complex. As staged by Wes Grantom, “The Steadfast” doesn’t lose sight of the importance of character. The cast is resourceful (Matt Dellapina does fine work in multiple parts), working in a production more sensitive to differences in personality than to details of speech, dress or politics. Despite wild shifts in epoch, these vary little. That can prove confusing at times, but it also nods to an implicit argument: All veterans share a bond.

The play’s major flaw is that the playwright can be heard too clearly. When a character brings up an ancestor who was in the military, you know that a dot is about to be connected. An oak tree introduced in the first scene becomes a meaning-infused metaphor before it is a piece of nature. Even some of the dialogue has the whiff of an M.F.A. program. (“Write her what you know,” Powell advises one soldier about a letter home.)

A version of this review appears in print on January 26, 2013, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Long Line Marching to War, and Sometimes From It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe